The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and may not constitute prior art.
Various hybrid seed is currently produced by removing male flower parts of the female parent by hand-emasculation and then hand-pollinating the female flowers with pollen from a male parent. This method is labor intensive and expensive, and limits seed production to areas where the use of hand labor is available and cost-effective. For example, gynecious plant types have been developed for use as female parents in some types of melons, and if strongly expressed, these types do not require hand manipulations. However, the gynecious trait is complexly inherited and incompletely penetrant, making it difficult to breed and use.
Genetic male-sterility controlled by single recessive nuclear genes has been identified in cucurbits and other fruit and vegetable bearing plants. This trait could be used to develop male-sterile female parents that would not require flower removal or hand emasculation, and it would allow the use of bees for pollination. However, male-sterile lines always segregate for sterile and fertile plants because they must be maintained by pollinating male-sterile plants (ms/ms) with heterozygous, isogenic male-fertile plants (Ms/ms). Thus, the use of nuclear genic male-sterility requires that the male-fertile segregants be removed from the female parent rows in hybrid seed production fields. This process is labor intensive and often ineffective because the male-fertile plants are difficult to identify in the field. For this reason, previous efforts by seed companies to develop this trait were abandoned.
The present disclosure addresses needs in the art for improved methods of producing hybrid seeds using high-throughput, nondestructive seed sampling systems.